Paul will talk about some insights he gained from the book “Your Brain at Work” by David Rock on how your brain reacts when under stress and when dealing with people. He will also talk about what characteristics he feels make many of the commonly used testing metrics bad. He will review how he used to plan testing and report on test progress which avoided the use of bad metrics while he was at Alcatel-Lucent.

Paul Holland is an independent consulting tester and teacher at Testing Thoughts (www.testingthoughts.com). He has over 17 years of hands-on testing and test management experience, primarily at Alcatel-Lucent. Paul has been consulting and delivering training for the past 5 years. He teaches the Rapid Software Testing course for James Bach’s company, Satisfice (www.satisfice.com). Paul has delivered training to companies such as Intel, Intuit, Progressive Insurance, HP, RIM and General Dynamics.

During his time at Alcatel-Lucent he led a complete transformation of the testing approach for two product divisions making them more efficient and effective. As a test manager and tester he focused on exploratory testing, test automation, and improving testing techniques.